ASSASSINS

by Mike Bond

  Exhaust pulsed up through the floorboards. “No one leaves the camp,” the driver said, a sallow unshaven man named Hamid whom Jack hated.

  Jack slid the Galil butt-first to the floor so the muzzle pointed straight up between them. “I have to meet the new Afghani.”

  Hamid raised his hands to say only God would’ve ordained me to drive this fool. He tried to get the truck into first but it wouldn’t go so he slipped it into second and jerked and sputtered up the hill. Looking back Jack saw that no one seemed to have noticed.

  As if moving the gun from the gearshift he turned it over. The fire selector was at the Hebrew character for Safe. He slid his thumb down the breech and shoved it all the way back to Semi.

  He glanced back: no one was coming.

  They drove down the hills, the Litani river valley like a green billiard table below. Still no one behind, no dust plume on the road ahead. He swung the Galil up, shot Hamid twice in the head and grabbed the steering wheel as Hamid jerked sideways, blood spurting down the inside of the door.

  Hamid’s sandal was jamming the accelerator. Steadying the wheel Jack kicked at the foot till it slid free. The truck puttered to a stop. Ears ringing, Jack went round and opened Hamid’s door. It was streaked with blood and brains. He dragged Hamid into the desert, yanked off his headscarf and wiped down the outside and inside of the door. He moved the Galil’s fire selector back to the middle, Automatic, and drove fast toward Labwé, the rising sun casting his shadow far ahead of him.

  Sleeping with Scorpions

  “YOU’RE OUR ONLY asset who’s ever seen a Hezbollah camp.” Timothy Cormac tipped ashes from his cigar. “Let alone got out alive.”

  Jack crossed to the motel room window and bent down a blind, the glass opaque with rain. In the three days since he’d landed in DC not a hint of sun. “And what good did it do?”

  “What Timothy means,” Bernie Rykoff said, “you guys on the ground, you sometimes can’t see the whole picture.”

  “The whole picture? The day I got to Cyprus I gave you the location, names, troop strength – the whole fucking picture I risked my life for! I drew you a map that was couriered the same night to Langley. You had it next morning...”

  “Not till afternoon, actually,” Timothy said.

  “You could’ve erased that camp! The Independence was right there in the Med. F-16’s in Turkey... Instead you pissed it away. Everything I did.”

  Bernie spun round a chair and straddled it. “Jack, we burn fifteen million barrels of oil every day in this country. Nearly half of it’s from Arab countries.”

  “They sell us oil and we let them kill us?”

  Timothy peered disdainfully at the Day-Glo print over the motel bed, the cheap ornate lamps, the brown nylon bedspread and dirty shag rug. “You’re too passionate by half, Jack.”

  Jack thought of Timothy’s Georgetown home, the antiques, Iranian carpets, the modern abstracts, of Timothy going through life scorning some things and collecting others. “I’m glad I didn’t go to Yale. At West Point, at least, they taught you to be who you are –”

  Timothy smiled, unoffended. “And so they did at Yale. But as I remember you got kicked out of the Point.” He smiled again. “Didn’t you?”

  Bernie tucked up a trouser seam. “It’s natural, Jack, when you’ve been in danger, to be pissed at folks you think haven’t supported you. Hell, I felt that way after Nam.”

  Under Bernie’s short sleeves his biceps were skinny as his wrists. Jack couldn’t see him humping sixty pounds plus weapons through the paddies. You were a clerk somewhere.

  “Hezbollah, Islamic Salvation, Hamas,” Jack said, “they’re hitting us in Europe and the Middle East now, but soon they’ll hit us in the States! They’ve got tons of opium in Lebanon and Afghanistan and billions of oil dollars from Saudi charities, all the training they need from Iran. At least let’s stop heroin shipments out of the Beqaa!”

  “Cut off heroin?” Bernie huffed. “Want to start a revolution in New York?”

  “It pays for weapons,” Timothy said. “Money Congress won’t appropriate.”

  “These Arabs we’re bringing into Afghanistan, they’re deranged by Islam.”

  “Islam,” Bernie said, “is a perfectly acceptable religion.”

  “The more you’re biased, Jack,” Timothy said, “the less useful you are.”

  He glanced at Timothy’s pasty fingers, at his own hard hands. “When they’re preaching that every non-Muslim must be exterminated?” He grabbed Timothy’s puffy fore- arm, felt him withdraw. “It’s like Kristallnacht, Hitler coming to power...”

  “Kristallnacht was November nineteen thirty-eight.” Timothy said. “Hitler came to power in thirty-three. Learn your history.”

  “Even then we could have stopped them, saved millions of lives –” Jack opened the door, walked into the rain to let it wash the DC filth out of his hair.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” Timothy called.

  “We’re not endangering any enemies – we’re just boys playing war.” When he came dripping back inside Timothy and Bernie broke off their conversation. “You asked me to stay Inside?” Jack said. “Well, I’ll make you a deal –”

  “We don’t do deals,” Timothy said.

  “You get together a high-level meeting – the President’s office, State, Defense... Let me present these issues to them. See what they say...”

  “There’s so much you don’t know, Jack. Can’t know. That’s going to impede your reaching people like that. Getting them to carry the ball for you.”

  Why, Jack wondered, were the people who used football metaphors the ones who’d never played a down? “Give me one shot.”

  He checked out of this motel room they had rented him in Reston under the name of Evan Dougherty, drove the Caprice they had rented him to Georgetown, and took a room in his own name at the Sheraton. When the rain stopped he wandered the streets. How many weeks – eight? – since he’d walked these streets with a ruined shoulder after coming back from the Hindu Kush? After she’d saved him and Bandit was dead? When Cole was still alive... And he’d found Cole’s killers but they weren’t going to kill them.

  He tried to imagine the lives of other people he saw – loud-talking smart-suited young men, nylon-legged girls in Burberrys hurrying home for dinner and affectionate sex, older men in town for conventions clustering on the sidewalks like lost ducks.

  All these bars and restaurants full of people trying to have fun. Did they all live half-lives, not intense and aware like you did on the edge?

  He ate Cajun food and drank too much tequila and ended up in a bar with a band named Slinky Pete, beside a dimpled girl who kept putting out her cigarette and lighting another.

  “Why don’t you just do it?” he said.

  “What, quit? What would I look forward to?”

  After all the tequila it was a mistake to drink Black Russians but he kept at it. Her name was Lindy and she was a secretary at the Department of Agriculture. “What do you do?” he said, trying to keep his voice steady.

  “I type crop replacement forms.”

  “Crop replacement forms?”

  “When a farmer gets paid to not grow a crop he has to send us information on how many acres he didn’t plant, what he would’ve planted, that kind...”

  “Not to grow a crop?”

  She looked at him. “Agricultural subsidies. We pay billions of dollars to farmers not to grow stuff. Each one has to be typed up. I’m one of the ones –”

  Maybe he couldn’t understand because he was drunk. He thought of the hardpan scrabble of the Beqaa hills, the flinty bedrock of the Panjshir, of farmers whose children died of hunger. “You don’t go insane?”

  “What do you do?” she challenged him back.

  “Wish I knew,” he laughed, feeling good from the Black Russians. “Journalist.”

  “The Post?”

  He shook his head. A mistake, for the room kept going round. “Up in Maine.”

  �
��Really? What’re you here for?”

  “Conference.” The music was too loud. “Paper manufacturers, that kind of stuff.”

  “Oh.” She lit another Vantage. He imagined the insides of her lungs dripping tar.

  When they danced he could feel her little pubis rub his thigh,

  All through the shadows they come and they go

  With only one thing in common

  They’ve got the fire down below

  Someday she’ll be married with kids, he thought, and all this long gone behind her.

  She had a roommate but snuck him into her own bedroom. Her mouth tasted of gin and ashes. “Want some hash?” she said after they made love, taking out a little plastic bag.

  He thought of the teenage hooker with her opium pipe in Rawalpindi, the opium camels crossing the Hindu Kush and the missiles coming back the other way, the blasted alleys of Beirut, the poppies tossing in the wind across the Litani lowlands.

  But the khief he’d smoked had shown him an inner world, the connectedness of all things and all people – was that what everyone was seeking? And failing to find?

  THEY MET IN A SIXTH floor room at Langley, no windows. A rubicund Middle East specialist from State, a gangling NSA man, an eager crewcut fellow with glasses from President Reagan’s national security group, a bejowled Defense Intelligence General with a tall square forehead and lots of ribbons, Bernie, and Timothy.

  “You’ve seen my memo,” Timothy said, “on what Jack’s done. His introduction of heat-seeking missiles into Afghanistan led to the destruction of over thirty Soviet aircraft and substantial losses of men and matériel. He’s united the northern mujihadeen against the Soviets, though he was seriously wounded in the process.”

  “Bravo!” said the President’s man.

  “And I’ve mentioned,” Timothy added, “what he’s done more recently in Lebanon. Hence our discussion today...” He turned to Jack. “You have twenty minutes.”

  “Taking out that Soviet major –” the General said. “Good job.”

  “What concerns me today,” Jack said, “is not Afghanistan or Lebanon but the growth of Islamic fundamentalism everywhere. And how our country is at risk –”

  He spoke without a break, trying to cover Hezbollah and other Islamic militants from their roots in the forties, the growth of Arab fanaticism in the sixties leading to the joint Arab attacks on Israel during the 1967 Six Days’ War, the bitterness of that defeat, and the decision to focus not on more dangerous military actions but on easier attacks on civilians.

  They sat silent, the State man toying with his coffee cup, the General rock-still, Bernie doodling with a silver pencil down the edge of a yellow pad. Do they already know all this?

  “And now by tricking Iraq into a war with Iran,” he continued, “one that’s cost millions of casualties and impoverishing both nations, the weapons we’re giving Saddam – even nerve gas –” he looked at the President’s man – “the false satellite data that got him into it – we’re creating generations of hatred.”

  “We had to pay the Iranians back,” the NSA man said, “for the Embassy takeover.”

  “But that takeover was caused by our overthrowing their government in fifty-four.”

  “They’re all just terrorists,” the General interrupted.

  “You can’t run a terrorist organization without money. They get it from us in Afghanistan, from drugs in both Afghanistan and Lebanon, and from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other oil sheikdoms via the Wahhabi charities.”

  “Keep the Saudis out of this,” the President’s man said. “Vice President Bush – our former Director, mind you – has been their butt boy for years...”

  “Politics,” State interrupted, “means succeeding at the possible.”

  “Five minutes more, Jack,” Timothy said.

  He took a breath. “One day coming into an Afghani village I heard awful screaming. I was afraid one of our fighters had been burned by napalm. I ran to the hut where the screams came from... Inside were ten, twelve Arab mujihadeen. Guys we’d imported from Saudi, Algeria. They had something tied to the wall – were flaying a side of beef, a sheep maybe. But it was bright red, writhing.” He fought to keep his voice steady. “It was a Russian prisoner. They were skinning him alive.”

  He looked round the silent room. “‘What are you doing?’ I yelled at them. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ one of them said to me. ‘He’s an infidel –’”

  “What’d you do, Jack?” Bernie said finally.

  “The Russian was just a kid, a draftee. His eyes out of that skinned sinewed face looked up at me in horror. I shot him in the head.”

  “Jesus Christ,” the NSA man shook his head. “Holy shit.”

  “These,” Jack said, “are the people we will face.”

  “Jack,” Timothy said softly, “we all respect what you’ve been through. But you can’t extrapolate from the behavior of one individual – okay, a few individuals – to the belief set of an entire religion composed of many nationalities, hundreds of ethnic groups.”

  “We’re at war with the Soviet Union,” the General said. “In war, soldiers die.”

  “In Afghanistan there’s a story,” Jack said, “of a man who puts a scorpion in his brother’s bed so he can inherit the farm. The brother dies and he takes over the farm. But the scorpion has nested in the brother’s bed, and he wakes to find them crawling all over him, stinging him to death.”

  Bernie quit doodling. “This Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, he’s published a book on how good Muslims should live. In it he deals with sexual abstinence. Says that if a man is horny it’s okay to fuck a chicken. But then he asks, well, what of the chicken? Can it be eaten?”

  “Puts a whole new spin on oral sex,” the NSA man observed.

  Bernie held up his silver pencil. “And the answer is yes! Although you may not feed it to your own family, you can to someone else’s.” He grinned. “I swear it’s true.”

  “Feeding it to your own family,” the President’s man said, “wouldn’t that be incest?”

  “So the answer,” the NSA man laughed, “is chicken soup?”

  Jack stared them down. “Their answer is for us to be dead.”

  “I don’t think you’ve proven that,” said State. “We need to show the Muslims some understanding, work with them to resolve their issues. Not bomb their camps for God’s sake. Don’t forget, Hezbollah’s doing a lot of good in the Beirut slums, keeping kids out of crime, that sort of thing.”

  “That, I might say,” Timothy put in, “is the dominant Agency view.”

  “Because you have no assets in the field,” Jack said. “Because you don’t know.”

  “Since Vietnam,” the General said, “the American people don’t want casualties.”

  “Two hundred fifty-four Marines and sixty-three people in our Embassy dead, another thousand injured, many maimed for life... Those aren’t casualties?”

  “You saw what happened last time the crude supply constricted, in seventy-eight?” Bernie said. “The barrel price went out of sight and drove us into a recession. That’s how Reagan beat Carter.”

  “And now Reagan’s up for reelection,” the President’s man said. “So we can’t risk any hitch in the economy.”

  “Even if we win in Afghanistan,” Jack said, “we’re creating a permanent civil war among rival clans. Before we came all they had were knives and muzzle-loaders. Now they have the best murder tools we can provide.”

  “Not nukes,” the General said. “They don’t have nukes.”

  “What will you do,” Jack stood, wanting to strangle him, beat them all into awareness, “when they do?”

  Sawtooths

  “IWANTED YOU to see your grandson,” Sophie said.

  “I’ve named him Leo. For his father.”

  “We hoped you’d come,” Leo’s mother held the baby in the crook of her arm, away from her body as if he’d break. “But I was so afraid to see him.” She gave him back and arranged the blanket on her lap.
“So. How was your flight?”

  “Fine. It was fine.” Sophie felt she had to say more. “Paris to Leningrad, it’s direct.”

  The baby kept crying, hunching his body into every scream. “His ears,” Sophie smiled. “Babies can’t get rid of –” she couldn’t think of the Russian word for ‘equalize’ – “the pressure.” She pinched his little nose shut but this just made him scream louder. She unbuttoned her blouse but he twisted his head away and kept screaming.

  Leo’s mother followed with her eyes as Sophie walked up and down the crowded room rocking the baby. Through the rust-streaked window Sophie caught glimpses of another concrete building ten feet away, other windows filthily reflecting the late afternoon sun. The window was part way open but that did not disperse the heat inside.

  “My husband will be back soon.” Leo’s mother sat still in her chair, under the wool blanket. “He’ll be pleased to see the baby.”

  Sophie looked round. “Have you always lived here?”

  “When Leo... When Leo was little we lived in the country, out east. Ekaterinburg. Later we were lucky to get this place.”

  “Your husband – where does he work?”

  “He’s retired now. Military pension, though for a while he kept working, in a truck factory... the Kamaz trucks – do you know them?”

  “They had them in Af... They had them in Afghanistan.”

  “In Paris you don’t have them?”

  “No, we have our own trucks.”

  The baby was quieting and Sophie sat. The chair was too soft; she would never get out. “We have a saying,” Leo’s mother said. “Maybe you know it, such good Russian as you speak. The heart which hardens itself to sorrow hardens also to joy.”

  “It’s the same heart,” Sophie said, “that feels both.”

  “But it’s not true.” Leo’s mother raised her voice. “Sorrow wipes out joy. Joy doesn’t exist. Not any longer.”

  Clasping the baby to her Sophie took her hand. “Everything passes,” she said lamely.

  Leo’s mother looked up. “It passes for you already, this sorrow?”